Liner Notes

mensah demary's previous Liner Notes columns for The Butter can be found here. This will be brief. Released in 2003, The Black Album was to be Jay Z’s finality before retirement. How, exactly, a rapper can retire still puzzles me. I assume a retired rapper refuses to rap, on the premise that he/she is now “retired” and therefore “doesn’t do that anymore.” But Michael Jordan still plays basketball, albeit in his personal gym, despite being…

mensah demary's previous Liner Notes columns for The Butter can be found here. I woke up this morning with a bit of anxiety. Sunday, Brooklyn: the gym loomed, as did multiple deadlines tumbling all around me, as if drowning in one of those playpens full of colorful plastic or rubber balls, and I had emails to answer, and documents to review, and decisions to make. Adulthood awaited, and I didn’t even have brunch plans…

mensah demary's previous Liner Notes columns for The Butter can be found here. This past week, I started a new job. And with new jobs come new responsibilities, new people to meet, new expectations, new office politics. Combined, a culture shock occurs, so perhaps I’m reeling from the novelty of my new employment, the drastic, yet thankful (oh so thankful) changes that have come my way. This, I assume, is an explanation for what…

mensah demary's previous Liner Notes columns for The Butter can be found here. I was in my ex-wife’s car the first time I heard Frank Ocean. Early summer, or late spring, in 2011—we were still married, still friends. Anyway, I remember the car because we had recently purchased it, albeit used—there was no “new car smell,” but it was steam-cleaned and fresh. She drove around town to run errands; I rode shotgun, probably staring…

mensah demary's previous Liner Notes columns for The Butter can be found here. More than sports, perhaps, music served as the bridge between my brothers and me. They are eleven and seven years older than me, respectively. The years between us sometimes creates a space that can’t be measured quantitatively and seems impossible to traverse, to narrow, and even possibly close. I perceive their ages—the fact that they are older than me—as though they…

mensah demary's previous Liner Notes columns for The Butter can be found here. General feelings of uplift, of the future light beamed and burned against the cold historic slabs. Hands clasped together in Emoji prayers. Play Kendrick’s "Alright." It is a reminder, like the thunderbolt, that change comes swiftly, but only after the painstaking patience of people peering over the precipice. Hard times like God Bad trips like: "God!" Nazareth, I'm fucked up Homie you…

mensah demary's previous Liner Notes columns for The Butter can be found here. It is 2015, Summer, and my birthday is quickly approaching—meaning I’m more nostalgic, and therefore more maudlin, than usual. But I allow myself recollection. It’s part of my art. It has become, unintentionally, the heart of these ongoing Liner Notes—more love letters to my favorite music, and documentation of my tumbling down various wormholes connecting my present to the past, than…

mensah demary's previous Liner Notes columns for The Butter can be found here. My music collection has diversified over recent years. I blame it on people, if such a wondrous thing can be “blamed” on anyone. But having met many different people over the years, both online and off, I can say that the expansion of one’s music library is a fantastic side effect of being social, of being open to people—something that’s coming…

Popular Series

mensah demary's previous Liner Notes columns for The Butter can be found here. It’s rare, but it happens…you find yourself in need of music, a specific kind of music, to match your mood or temperament, but nothing in your personal collection will suffice. For me, the stranger phenomenon is knowing when I need to hear something new, to soothe something deep and personal and nameless within me. A kind of melancholia that has a…

mensah demary's previous Liner Notes columns for The Butter can be found here. A movie soundtrack, in order for me to listen to it repeatedly, has to simultaneously resurface the mood generated by its accompaniment with the motion picture, and cause within me an entirely different feeling. A feeling that would be muted, or otherwise wiped out entirely, while watching the movie—visuals and music combined. Months ago, I first made my case for movie soundtracks…

mensah demary's previous Liner Notes columns can be found here. I’ve told this story before in the past, with varying degrees of accuracy. The memories are vague, the details hidden behind a fog that seems to thicken the older I get. Each time I tell the story of how my oldest brother introduced me to The Roots, I’m forced to let go of another detail—I no longer remember what I was wearing, or whether my brother…

mensah demary's previous Liner Notes columns can be found here. North New Jersey, the immediate region outside Manhattan’s skyline, is industrial, depressive, and idyllic for mass graves. Flat land trashed by freight cars and construction equipment parked for reasons–practical reasons–beyond expansion or development. Factories and the occasional smokestack. A random stadium stands alone amid the sprawling vacancy. The train approaches Newark. People on the platform stood atop the cement, angry, engaged in conversation or…

mensah demary's previous Liner Notes columns for The Butter can be found here. “I know everything,” Kendrick Lamar says in the track “Momma,” from his new album To Pimp a Butterfly. “I know Compton, I know street shit, I know everything that’s conscious…I know wisdom, I know bad religion, I know good karma, I know everything, I know history, I know the universe works mentally…I know everything.” I don’t know what Kendrick knows. I…

mensah demary's previous Liner Notes columns can be found here. In 2000, during my first year in college, something rotated deep within my blood. I imagined it as a black rock, a piece of obsidian spinning like a planet. I didn’t have a name for it at the time. It had the weight and texture of grief, but anger was pent up inside the stone. My best friend had died in January, consumed by a…

mensah demary's previous Liner Notes columns for The Butter can be found here. Things change within a week. Valentine's Eve, with broken hearts prepped for the weekend, or new relationships re-fortified through gifts Instagrammed, was the perfect day for Drake to drop, without warning, a new album. If it can be called an album. More like the nebulous “tape” label he assigned to it. Regardless, it arrived. I've followed his career closely since the…